Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
In April 1943, Gerhard Riegner, the World Jewish Congress representative in Switzerland, proposed a plan to facilitate the transmission of funds from American Jewish organizations to those caring for the hidden children of France and also to groups trying to transfer Romanian Jewish children out of camps in the Romanian-Soviet border regions known as
Transnistria to Palestine. To the plan for the children was later added the possibility that Romania would release their parents too, in all about 70,000 people.
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The proposal, which would not cost the U.S. government anything, did, however, have to be approved by the Treasury and State departments, as it involved the transfer of funds from the United States to an enemy power. In addition, it was clear that most of the 70,000 would head for Palestine in violation of British efforts to limit Jewish immigration to that area. The idea was enthusiastically supported by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and approved by President Roosevelt. But nativist elements in the State Department, and more importantly, the British, disagreed. The bickering continued for months; but by now the feeling that something must be done was mounting in many areas of public opinion. On November 9, 1943, a resolution recommending the creation of an immediate plan to rescue “the surviving Jewish people of Europe from extinction at the hands of Nazi Germany” was introduced in the Congress.
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Although support for the measure in the press and elsewhere was strong, its passage was far from automatic, as the usual opponents had lost none of their resolve. Breckinridge Long, a frequent nemesis of immigration at the State Department, in secret testimony that caused an uproar when it was leaked, gave negative and misleading statistics on the number of refugees who had already been given visas. Even more astonishing was the continued opposition of Zionist leaders and congressmen, who argued against the measure because it did not specify the immediate opening of Palestine to all Jewish refugees. Once again, the Congress would take no action: Roosevelt, at the urging of Morgenthau, preempted what was shaping up to be a nasty floor debate, especially undesirable in an election year, with an executive order on January 22, 1944, establishing the War Refugee Board, which would deal with the whole issue.
This small, minimally funded agency was headed by John Pehle, a determined and very humane former Treasury official. During its short existence, the WRB is thought to have saved more than 250,000 people by supporting the secret direct negotiations carried on by operatives such as Raoul Wallenberg and Ira Hirschmann with the now wavering Axis partners of Germany, as well as with the neutral nations, and even, at one point, with Himmler himself. Through these negotiations thousands would find protection and support in France, Sweden, Switzerland, and Spain. Far larger numbers would be saved by persuading Romania simply to move the Jews in Transnistria out of their foul transit camps and away
from the path of the retreating Germans, and Bulgaria to rescind its anti-Jewish laws. Wallenberg, working in Budapest in the midst of the Nazi deportations, would manage against all odds to save 120,000.
But fewer than a thousand of those rescued would be admitted to Camp Oswego in the United States under WRB auspices, and then only due to an executive order signed by Roosevelt, which, to keep Congress happy, promised that their stay would only be temporary. From the beginning, the gloomy and remote camp was not a fun place to be. The internees were carefully supervised; the only ones allowed out for more than six hours at a time were the 180 children, who went to the local schools. This measure meant that no one could look for a job or go anywhere. The seventeen different nationalities represented did not get along and did not want to do the menial work needed for the running of the camp. Those who had relatives in the United States could not fathom why they could not go and live with them. It was not until a few days before Christmas 1945 that Harry S. Truman, who had become President upon FDR’s death in April, realized, for reasons that will later become clear, that repatriation was not possible and allowed the Oswego internees to leave the camp and remain in the United States as legal immigrants.
In the occupied nations of Western Europe, existence, even for those living at home, and particularly in towns and cities, had been utterly transformed by the end of 1943. Deception and secrecy pervaded everything. To protect their valuables from German requisitioning raids, families buried silver in their gardens, created secret compartments in attics, and hid radios in cellars. Relatives and friends fleeing from various kinds of pursuit were routinely hidden behind false walls. Children knew all these things and became used to strange noises in the night, but knew better than to tell anyone. Without telephones or radios, which were illegal, most news was circulated by word of mouth and underground newspapers. To this furtive mix was added simple fear. Fathers and brothers could be arrested without warning, taken from their homes, and tortured to reveal Resistance connections or be held for months as hostages, who were regularly executed in reprisal for hostile acts by the population.
As time passed and war production eliminated consumer goods, the problems became more physical.
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Shoes disappeared. Parents remade their own clothes for their growing children; by 1944, many a mother had only one dress to her name. Diminishing fuel supplies forced families to huddle in one room of a house, often on an upper floor, which was marginally
warmer, and no amount of money could buy municipal utilities such as natural gas, water, or electricity, which were frequently cut off altogether. Hot baths were rare, and all sorts of tiny stoves, which could cook a pot of food and simultaneously provide warmth, were constructed. Slowly but relentlessly, urban parks and streets were denuded of trees, which were followed by wooden furniture, picture frames, doorjambs, and parquet floors. To ignite these often beloved objects, libraries and magazine collections were shredded for kindling. Sporadic raids by German troops took away blankets, sewing machines, pots and pans. As food supplies and consumer goods vanished, so did shops and the jobs and salaries that went with them.
What was not burned in the stoves was bartered for food from farmers and black marketeers who often visited their clients in the dark of night. By 1943, most small children had never seen a banana or an orange. Since men and boys were in constant danger of being picked up by patrols, the hunter-gatherer role now fell to women and children. Procuring even authorized items with ration stamps required hours of standing in line. Girls and younger boys performed this endless duty and also trekked out of the cities to forage for fuel and beg farmers for milk and bread. They had plenty of time: the combination of no heat, little food, and the need for boths boys over twelve and male teachers to hide led to the closure of schools in many areas. In Holland, some teachers would write assignments on the blackboard every Monday and students would come in to copy them and go home to study. But cold, dark, smoky rooms and the constant hunt for food were not conducive to homework, and health was so endangered by malnutrition that children who would not normally be at risk suffered from fatigue and died of diphtheria, scarlet fever, and other childhood ills.
Nor was there entertainment outside the home for the average person. After D-Day, ever stricter curfews made going out at night in the pitch-dark cities impossible and most restaurants, theaters, and movie houses were closed or limited to collaborators, German officials, and the nouveaux riches of the black market economy. Few could offer anyone else much of a meal at home, and most outdoor activities were too exhausting for those who seldom saw meat and lived on bread and, if they were lucky, things like boxes of dried peas they had had the foresight to procure early in the war. By September 1944, with Allied forces well into France and Italy, relief was tantalizingly near for the rest of Europe. But the Nazis would not give up easily. By this time, for many, only the churches remained as gathering places. On Christmas Eve 1944, as Allied forces
struggled not far away in the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans lifted the curfew in Holland for midnight services. Fourteen-year-old Cornelia Fuykschot and her friends crossed the blacked-out town of Utrecht to the only church allowed to turn on its interior lights. After months of living in darkness, what the girl found inside the huge neo-rococo Catholic basilica was almost overwhelming:
As we approached the church, the streets seemed to be alive with dark figures, all moving in the same direction.… Only a little door inside the big doors could allow the celebrants in, otherwise too much light would escape through the portal to the outside.… White was the ceiling and white were the walls … white above all that mass of people that covered not only the seats but also all the floor space … white lined with gold which only intensified the brightness.… The eye could only move up, up to all this white, heavenly light following all the roses and garlands and angels which seemed to produce the jubilant music with their golden trumpets that in fact came from an organ we could not see. What else could the pastor preach about but the light that had come into the darkness and conquered it? How well we understood what that meant.
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The Nazis, who, for entirely different reasons, were equally enamored of the light-and-darkness analogy, understood also, which was why the curfew was only lifted for one night.
In the early summer of 1943, the war in many areas of Western Europe would cease to be limited to physical and spiritual deprivations and the disappearances of friends and family, and instead became violent. On June 10, Allied forces landed in Sicily and began their slow and terrible progress up through Italy, a campaign that, due to the ferocious defense of the Germans, would last until the end of the war in 1945 and have brutal effects on the civilian population. The bombing of England by the Germans, which had continued only sporadically after the Battle of Britain, was now revived and, in 1944, was augmented by Hitler’s terrifying “secret weapons,” the V-1 and V-2 rockets, some 3,000 of which fell on London alone. It was also in 1943 that the destruction of war, to a degree never before seen, began to fall upon Germany itself, from many thousands of Allied bombers whose actions would eventually kill some 650,000 civilians, giving credence in the minds of many to Goebbels’s warnings that the Allies were bent on extermination.
The 100,000 Hitler Youth recruited to man the antiaircraft emplacements were badly needed. Eighteen thousand boys and girls were brought in from the Baltics, Belorussia, and the Ukraine to increase their number.
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An estimated two million people would be involved in antiaircraft defense by 1944. The flak guns were a major deterrent to the bombers until they were overwhelmed by the technological advances and the sheer production capacity of the Allies. At the beginning, the bombing raids were exciting for German kids; like those in Spain, they collected and traded shrapnel splinters. To some, being in the raids gave them “the feeling that we were like the soldiers fighting at the front.” Teenaged girls in Leipzig hoped the raids would last all night so that school would be closed the next day. Children everywhere patrolled the rooftops and learned how to pick up and throw off unexploded incendiary bombs: “The bombs were soon our favorite toys. We threw them down from walls … we wanted to be just like grown-ups putting out fires and recovering the injured. That was our everyday play.”
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Boys sent to the flak emplacements were also excited to “be soldiers.” The tracking of the aircraft and the guns themselves were endlessly fascinating. Usually the boys were assigned with schoolmates; for a time, efforts were made to have teachers go to the gun positions to give them lessons. Most emplacements had one adult gunner, two fifteen- or sixteen-year-old assistants, and a varying number of younger boys and girls who manned the searchlights, passed ammunition, and acted as messengers. It was all great fun playing in the piles of equipment and even, at one post, in a stack of stored coffins. The children were supposed to be assigned to batteries near home, but as the bombing increased they were often transferred to the Ruhr and other major target areas. The fun wore off fast, but the children’s indoctrination, bolstered by the horrors they witnessed all around them and their natural desire to defend home and family, only led to greater determination. In a Berlin suburb, BDM leader Melita Maschmann, back from her duty in Poland,
saw a row of dead anti-aircraft auxiliaries lying side by side.… The … base where these schoolboys were serving had received several direct hits: I went into a barrack room where the survivors were gathered. They sat on the floor along one wall, and the white faces they turned toward me were distorted with fear. Many of them were weeping.… In another room lay the wounded. One of them, a boy with a soft, round childish face, held himself rigid when the officer … asked him if he was in pain. “Yes, but it doesn’t matter. Germany must triumph.”
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The horrors became more and more extreme. Some 700,000 Hitler Youth were used in Fire Defense Squads and more as helpers in airraid shelters, which had become quite sophisticated in design, ranging from complex tubelike bunkers in Hamburg to the enormous flak towers of Berlin, which held several thousand persons along with tons of art objects and boasted sophisticated medical facilities. In Hamburg, thirteen-year-old Hitler Youth Uwe Köster opened and closed shelter doors, brought milk for children, handed out sedatives to nervous adults, and pumped air into the bunkers. He was not supposed to stay inside the shelter. Wearing a gas mask, a helmet, and his uniform, he was required to continue working and to carry messages from place to place even during the worst part of a raid. On July 24, 1943, and during the ten days that followed, Hamburg was subjected to six major air attacks by some 2,600 Allied bombers. Dropping the tinsel forbidden on American Christmas trees over the city to deceive radar, the planes poured an estimated 1.5 million incendiary bombs into densely inhabited areas. The biggest raid, on July 27, created a firestorm with temperatures nearing 1,000 degrees Celsius and winds reaching 150 miles per hour.
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